Making The Frontier Man

Contextualizes the Development of Early American Violence and Gun Culture For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimized killing as a means of self-defense—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbors declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds. Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.

This 2005 book explores the evolution of Americans' first way of war, to show how war waged against Indian noncombatant population and agricultural resources became the method early Americans employed and, ultimately, defined their military heritage. The sanguinary story of the American conquest of the Indian peoples east of the Mississippi River helps demonstrate how early Americans embraced warfare shaped by extravagant violence and focused on conquest. Grenier provides a major revision in understanding the place of warfare directed on noncombatants in the American military tradition, and his conclusions are relevant to understand US 'special operations' in the War on Terror.

“The Men of the Last Frontier” is a 1922 work by Grey Owl. Part memoir, part chronicle of the vanishing Canadian wilderness, and part collection First Nations lore and stories. His first book, “The Men of the Last Frontier” is an impassioned cry for the conservation of the natural world that is as poignent now as when first published. Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (1888–1938), also known as Grey Owl, was a British-born Canadian fur trapper, conservationist, and writer. In life, he pretended to be a First Nations person, but it was later discovered that he was in fact not Indigenous—revelations that greatly tarnished his reputation. Other notable works by this author include: “The Men of the Last Frontier”, “Pilgrims of the Wild”, and “Tales of an Empty Cabin”. This classic work is being republished now in a new edition with specially curated introductory material.

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate, coonskin cap-wearing patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. The scarcity of surviving autobiographical material has allowed tellers of his story to fashion a Boone of their own liking, and his myth has evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex -- and far more interesting -- than his legend. Brown traces Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions. Devoted to his wife and children, he nevertheless embarked on long hunts that could keep him from home for two years or more. A captain in colonial Virginia's militia, Boone later fought against the British and their Indian allies in the Revolutionary War before he moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and became a Spanish civil servant. Boone did indeed kill Indians during the bloody fighting for Kentucky, but he also respected Indians, became the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and formed lasting friendships with many Shawnees who once held him captive. During Boone's lifetime (1734--1820), America evolved from a group of colonies with fewer than a million inhabitants clustered along the Atlantic Coast to an independent nation of close to ten million reaching well beyond the Mississippi River. Frontiersman is the first biography to explore Boone's crucial role in that transformation. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on the road that Boone and his axemen blazed from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Boone's leadership in the defense of Boonesborough during a sustained Indian attack in 1778 was instrumental in preventing white settlers from fleeing Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. And Boone's move to Missouri in 1799 and his exploration up the Missouri River helped encourage a flood of settlers into that region. Through his colorful chronicle of Boone's experiences, Brown paints a rich portrayal of colonial and Revolutionary America, the relations between whites and Indians, the opening and settling of the Old West, and the birth of the American national identity. Supported with copious maps, illustrations, endnotes, and a detailed chronology of Boone's life, Frontiersman provides a fresh and accurate rendering of a man most people know only as a folk hero -- and of the nation that has mythologized him for over two centuries.

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, there existed a dominant discourse on what it meant to be a man –denoted by the term 'manliness'. Based on the sociological work of R.W. Connell and others who argue that gender is performative, Robert Hogg asks how British men performed manliness on the colonial frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia.

Reveals how British imperial border-making in the Himalayas transformed a crossroads into a borderland and geography into politics.

Making a Modern U.S. West surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940, centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region—the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders.